Virtual reality is moving fast at the BBC. In October last year, we launched BBC VR Hub, a new studio that will spearhead the BBC’s VR production and explore how VR can create real audience impact.

In the last few weeks we have released our first film, Damming the Nile VR, a two-part VR news documentary series exploring the water politics of the famous river. Viewers go on assignment with the BBC News team on a fascinating journey, taking in the Nile’s beautiful sights and dramatic sounds as they travel through canyons and fly above waterfalls. But they also learn about the political tensions that might be behind the world’s first war over water. 

Damming the Nile VR was produced in partnership with BBC News, and has been designed as a high quality mobile VR experience and released for both Gear VR in a new app and on YouTube, in part because we wanted the film to be as accessible as possible, something that hasn’t always been the case. Our previous experiments have produced some wonderful experiences, but not everyone has the hardware required to try them out.

That’s why we decided to take some of our top VR experiences out on the road to universities across the country to bring this new technology to the next generation. We created our ‘VR Box’ and took it to Manchester Metropolitan University, Swansea University and Oxford Brookes University to let students try out some VR from the BBC for themselves and get a taste of the future.

One of the experiences they could try was Home – A VR Spacewalk, an interactive VR film inspired by British astronaut Tim Peake’s real-life experiences training with NASA. In the experience, you risk your life on a spacewalk 250 miles above the Earth’s surface. Your task is to make a repair on the outside of the International Space Station, before being confronted with a terrifying emergency situation.

For the students who tried it, the experience was transformative. One student said that it was "pretty amazing" and describing it as "the first and only chance I’ll ever get this close to space". Another said that VR is "definitely a big new field to go and discover", adding that "there’s so much to learn and we’re just at the beginning". Home – A VR Spacewalk launched publicly for the first time recently and is now available to download for free via the Steam Store and the Oculus Store.

The BBC VR Box also featured an interactive VR fairytale, The Turning Forest, currently available for Google Daydream and the Samsung Gear VR. This transports you to a magical, musical forest, where you stare into the eyes of a fantastical creature before embarking on a journey together.

As well as being a beautiful VR spectacle, the Turning Forest also demonstrates the importance of sound in immersive experiences. It was built from the sound up, and features a spatial soundtrack that uses dynamic binaural audio. As you turn your head the sound moves too, creating a thoroughly immersive environment that feels like a real place.

VR Box also showed how you can use VR to step into your favourite TV shows. The Queen Vic Experience enables EastEnders fans to explore Walford’s famous pub, with interactive elements that let you pull a pint, throw darts and play on the piano. You can even spot Den and Angie’s divorce papers if you look carefully enough.

Students also learnt first-hand about working in VR. Producers and specialists from BBC Research & Development, BBC Three and BBC Wales gave talks about working with virtual reality and how it can transform storytelling. And they explained how working at the BBC gives them the opportunity to work on innovative projects that push boundaries, helping them create something truly unique.

For example, BBC Three producer Ian Ravenscroft spoke to students in Oxford and Swansea about a series he produced called Step Inside My Head. The series of short films saw people with different mental health issues use a VR tool called a Google Tilt Brush to ‘paint’ what their condition feels like.

Ian and his team then used an innovative mixed-reality filming technique to capture the painting process – using VR as a film-making technique for the first time for the BBC. The resulting films are beautiful and help give people some understanding of what mental health conditions like borderline personality disorder, psychotic depression and anorexia and bulimia feel like.

The BBC has always sought to innovate to serve current and future audiences, from our first days broadcasting radio in 1922, to introducing colour TV in the Sixties, right through to VR today. Thanks to the early experiments that have taken VR Box on tour, we’ve been able to look at what works and what doesn’t, and to better understand how we can tell stories in this new and exciting medium.

In the future, VR Hub will continue to take the lessons learned from these early experiments to create more moving, engaging and memorable new experiences across a wide range of genres, and help usher this new and emerging medium into the mainstream.

Zillah Watson is Head of BBC VR Hub

Since it launched nearly two years ago the BBC’s Make it Digital initiative has brought together dozens of partners to promote and celebrate all forms of digital creativity, and inspired millions of people to get involved with the technologies that surround us. Digital creativity opens doors to allow us all to take part in and shape our world, and to get many of the good jobs of the future. Digital is the means of production of the coming century we want everyone to control.

We believe that creating a level playing field when it comes to digital opportunity is vital because so much of what we do every day is shaped by digital. We've worked with our partners to deliver real change, using the BBC’s ability to create compelling shows and content and bringing audiences together to encourage people to try something new, like uploading a photograph, signing up as a digital trainee or writing code.

Across BBC News outlets last week, under the banner Tech Talent, we asked whether the UK can compete in the global technology industry - and why we haven't produced a tech giant on the scale of Google or Apple. It’s a topic that matters to everyone involved in Make it Digital, because liberating everyone’s digital creativity, and encouraging entrepreneurs – or those who might become entrepreneurs – are pretty important to our thinking. Creating new companies, coming up with ideas that can change the world, and developing innovative technologies are all aspects of the sort of creativity we want to unleash, alongside our partners.

We’re doing this in lots of ways. Working with libraries across the UK we’re encouraging people to sign up as BBC Weather Watchers, posting photographs and weather observations to our website where they can be seen and regularly used on BBC Weather forecasts on television and online. We think that this sort of easy engagement with modern tools like smartphones and digital cameras is vital to build a society that is at ease with the capabilities of the internet and computers.

And on Wednesday evening last week, The One Show featured a wide selection of Weather Watchers photographs as they talked about the Great British Summer that has just come to a stormy end.

We’ve also distributed up to a million BBC micro:bits to 11 and 12 year olds across the entire UK, and as they all enter year 8, or equivalent, we look forward to seeing the fruits of their creative coding reflected in a range of projects as exciting as sending a BBC micro:bit, alongside a Raspberry Pi, into space. If you missed them, here are some amazing examples of how people have used their BBC micro:bits.

Coming up is The Big Food Survey, in collaboration with Wellcome Foundation's ‘The Crunch’. It will be the UK’s biggest ever food and health survey for 12 and 13 year olds, which will take place from Monday 3 -7 October. Students will be asked to use their BBC micro:bits, to gather data about their eating habits over the course of one day.

Then there’s Build it Scotland, which is marking Scotland’s Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design by encouraging budding architects aged 7-14 to help build Scotland’s top landmarks in a virtual world using 3D design software such as Minecraft, TinkerCad or Sketchup using PCs, laptops or Raspberry Pi. The deadline is October 20th, and we will see what they have created in November when the map is unveiled in Dundee, which is the finale event for the Festival of Architecture and the map with the landmarks will be projected on to a building in the city.

These are just a few of the Make it Digital projects that are inspiring people of all ages and all skill levels to get creative with digital tools. As for Tech Talent’s question of whether the UK can build its own Google or Apple – we think that we can, and that dozens of partners working with Make it Digital can help. Who knows - the CEO of the big British success of 2030 might be coding a BBC micro:bit in a classroom near you!

Jessica Cecil is Controller of BBC Make it Digital.

This seemingly small change to a programme page can lead you down interesting little alleyways to fascinating places you never expected to visit. For example, starting off at Ada Lovelace can take you all the way to a programme on Julius Caesar via ‘the Byron family’ followed by ‘Fellows of the Royal Society’ then ‘Captain James Cook’ and finally the ‘Deaths by stabbing’ topic tags. Give it a try here and see where you end up.

Some programmes like Desert Island Discs, which have a lot of programmes available, have navigation which is tailored very carefully to the brand. This makes it easy to find programmes but also means the system cannot be re-used across other BBC brands or programmes.

Most programmes do not have any way of browsing by subject though, especially one off documentaries and short series. They can be found by searching, but only if you already know what you are looking for and what it is called. Even then it’s very hard to find something new or surprising, even though there are so many programmes available.

Some attempts have been made to bring these hidden gems to light, but these have always involved a lot of manual curation of content by editors to find and keep the collections updated, which simply isn’t sustainable.

What we wanted to do was to find a way of connecting up all of these programmes in an automated way, and make it easier for our producers so they could spend all their time on creating the programmes we love. The BBC News and Sport websites use linked data to populate their pages, so with the infrastructure already set up to create and add tags, it seemed like this would be useful in connecting programmes.

However, it’s not as simple as just adding tags; you need to provide journeys between the tagged things. In Sport they have a structure which describes the relationship between things, which is used to power their website, so they know that a person belongs to a team which is part of a league which is part of a sport, therefore they only need to tag a story with a person and it will pop up on all of the relevant pages on the sport site.

In programmes there is no clear structure that can be added to the tags to create links between programmes, and with the subject of programmes being as diverse as the A470, Munch's “The Scream”, the cronut, Canada geese, existentialism and the Battle of Bosworth Field, it was clear that creating our own would be an enormous and maybe even impossible task.

We did look at using a variety of existing systems and approaches, such as Dewey Decimal found in libraries, and crowdsourcing where enthusiasts can help tag programmes, but none quite fitted the bill. After a great deal of searching and trial and error we found that the categories in Wikipedia looked very promising.

Categories are added by Wikipedians because they believe them to be important facets of the subject of the page, so they are likely to be more interesting than a dry statement of fact about each subject. They are also checked by other Wikipedians and will be removed if they disagree, so there’s a certain amount of quality control built in as well.

Using these categories, we built a beta system where we simply tagged each programme with its subject, gathered the Wikipedia categories for that subject automatically and matched them up, providing links between the programmes. This automatically created the navigation architecture that we needed, without us having to spend hours designing and updating it.

We needed to test it and put it through its paces so we looked at In Our Time, which has a rich archive of over 700 programmes with a wide range of subjects including people, places, events and philosophical terms. We felt if it worked for In Our Time it would work with anything.

The beta was launched in spring of last year and we promoted it on BBC Taster so we could get as much feedback as possible. We got a great response, with an overall rating of 4.15 stars (out of 5) which was really encouraging. Even better though, was the feedback we got through the beta itself, where people could actually tell us what they thought. This was brilliant because, given that most of them were positive about the experience and we were looking at rolling it out across all programmes, we needed to know what people liked and didn’t like so we could improve the whole experience.

Some people preferred navigating topics in other ways, such as by date or A-Z, and these will still be available in the programme pages for those who prefer that, alongside the additional topic journeys. Some thought a hierarchical structure for the topics would be better, so they could look at a broader subject and refine such as choosing ‘history’ then ‘19th century’. The difficulty with that sort of navigation is that it requires a lot of man hours inputting things into categories and also removes much of the serendipity of finding new links between things, which people told us they really liked.

Interestingly, some people realised that manually tagging all of these topics would be incredibly time-consuming, assumed that’s what we’d done and felt we shouldn’t have spent so much time doing it. But of course that was exactly the problem ADA was solving. And another user commented that they found they were learning about the subjects of the programmes just through the journeys and the tags, even before they had listened to them.

Many people commented on the fact that once they’d found new programmes they couldn’t download them in our stripped-down beta. This won’t be a problem in the new version as it will be integrated with the existing programme pages. Others asked for things we hadn’t thought of, like the ability to subscribe to the podcasts by topic and to favourite topics so they could be updated with new programmes of interest automatically. They seem like great ideas, and although we’re still working on perfecting this, they’re definitely on our list to look at when we’re done.

Lots more asked whether we could roll this out to other programmes, which is what we will be doing, so you should be able to find everything on social philosophy, for example, not just for one programme but across a variety of them.

We’re starting out small with a handful of programmes, including In Our Time of course, and will continue to expand over the coming months. We really hope that you enjoy finding new programmes and discovering more hidden gems in the archive, and we’d love to hear about the fascinating journeys you find yourself on.

Jo Kent, Business Analyst, BBC Radio & Music Multiplatform.

The Rio Olympic Games presents a key opportunity to provide our audience with the best possible experience on their connected TV; we want our audience to feel like they’re at the event and never miss a moment of the action.

When we set out to rethink Red Button+, our goal was to provide frictionless access from BBC television channels to compelling content from BBC iPlayer, Sport and News and more.

We’ve done this by improving the navigation between all of our BBC TV apps – and we’ve given BBC News and Sport a makeover, unifying design and interaction patterns so that users of BBC iPlayer will discover a familiar pattern when browsing, watching or reading content across all BBC products.

During the BBC’s Olympic coverage on television, ‘pressing red’ on your connected TV will instantly connect you with up to 24 HD streams of live coverage from BBC Sport, so nobody needs to miss a moment of the action that they want to watch.

We’ve made it easy to navigate to other sports, restart coverage if the start of an event has been missed, get the latest highlights, see what action’s coming up and catch up on any medal moments from previous days.

Plus it’s now even easier to access BBC iPlayer from a connected TV by ‘pressing red’, giving our audience a quick way to find the programmes they want to watch, or quickly restart the programme they are currently watching.

An innovative engineering solution underpins this change to our audience-facing products, meaning all our connected TV apps now share a common code-base, known internally as TAP (TV Application Platform). This approach eases the burden on support teams, enables faster product innovation and helps us to make our content available on more devices more easily - all through practical adoption of platform-thinking.

Jennifer Richardson is Senior Product Manager in BBC Design & Engineering.

• The BBC are the official broadcaster for the Rio 2016 Olympics in the UK.
• Find out more about Red Button+ and TV support.
• For more about BBC Sports Rio 2016 Olympics coverage read Kieran Clifton's blog 'The Rio 2016 Olympic Games, live on the BBC'.

Today we’re launching another onto BBC Taster, giving audiences a unique Queen’s eye view of ‘Trooping the Colour’. Teams from around the BBC have been working on a small number of ‘true VR’ experiments as well, which we’re also unveiling today. Andy Conroy, who heads up BBC Research and Development, has blogged about some of these more advanced projects, which you can find on the BBC R&D Blog. This is all part of the BBC’s early experimentation to help us better understand emerging technology and new mediums, explore the potential for future audiences, and see what kind of role the BBC should, or shouldn’t, be playing.

In terms of the technology, the main difference is that VR is more interactive and immersive than 360 degree video, which is very much as it sounds - a video played out in 360 degrees around the viewer.  However, both have the potential to give viewers a sense of presence. This is interesting to us as programme makers as it can help make people feel like they’re at the heart of the action or the story, which could help future audiences better understand important current affairs, news, science and history topics or give them a new perspective.

Experimenting with 360 video also has an advantage from a production point of view. The cameras or camera rigs are widely available and give programme makers the chance to see how it might complement our storytelling elsewhere, or get even more out of the projects they’re already working on. And we have hugely talented editorial teams inside BBC Studios wanting to explore this potential too - it's the people behind our BAFTA award winning TV series like Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, VE Day, and Stargazing Live that are piloting these experiments on Taster.

But they are not doing this on their own. VR pioneers like Oscar Raby, digital agencies like Rewind, Aardman, VRTOV and Crossover Labs, BBC R&D specialists like Zillah Watson and Simon Lumb, along with teams in BBC Learning and innovation teams across BBC TV are forming a "coalition of the willing and able" to better understand the opportunities and challenges in this emerging field.

For example, as well as watching Alexander Armstrong's BBC One documentary Rome's Invisible City, Alexander can now take you on a 3D tour of Rome's magnificent pantheon in virtual reality. BBC Learning can complement a TV and Radio season around the Easter Rising by transporting you to O’Connell Street in 1916, immersing you in one of the BBC’s first VR documentaries Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel. And in addition to watching Tim Peake on BBC Two's Stargazing Live, we can now put you in his spaceboots and send you 240 miles into the void above Earth in Home – a VR Spacewalk - inspired by the real VR training Tim performed.

Audiences have already responded to other immersive pilots on Taster. In fact there have been over eight million views for projects as varied as the Natural History Unit's Sir David Attenborough & The Giant Dinosaur, Click's tour of the CERN Large Hadron Collider and Strictly Come Dancing, all in 360 video.  Almost 2,000 pieces of feedback from people on BBC Taster have been completed with audiences responding favourably with an average score of 3.5 out of 5 stars, and comments stating that they felt immersed, part of the story - some even said it was "more real than TV".

Where these experiments with immersive technologies will take us is uncertain. They offer a glimpse of the promise of VR and what immersive experiences could provide to audiences, but they also bring new challenges we need to better understand. This is very early days, but these experiments, and the audience and industry feedback we can get from BBC Taster, are helping us do just that - helping inform any strategy the BBC may need in future.

Since then, we’ve been working hard to bring this ambition to life.  And, today we’ve published a progress report – sharing how we’re getting on.  This includes the launch of a host of new personalised features for those of you that have signed in to the BBC and changed some of the systems behind the scenes to help us know more about you – so we can give you more of what you want from the BBC. 

These are already starting to benefit millions of you.  In fact, in the last year, 6.4 million of you have signed in to the BBC – with over a third of you coming back to the BBC on a monthly basis to benefit from personalised signed-in experiences.  And, since this time last year:  

• 1.6 billion BBC programmes have been recommended to you - based on what you’ve previously watched/listened to and are interested in
  
  
• 1.4 billion personalised alerts have been sent via the BBC Sport app - along with 27 billion breaking news alerts from the BBC News app.  Leicester football fans might have had a few of these over the weekend.
  
  
• In the last 3 months alone, 1.7 million of you have personalised your myNews section on the BBC News app and website – selecting over 12 million topics to track. 
  
  
• Personalised experiences - including BBC iPlayer play, pause and resume notifications; and recommendations have been used by you an average 800 million times a day.  I had a Calvin Harris doc recommended to me the other day – I wouldn’t have found without it being recommended to me.
  
  
• There’s been an increase of 400% in the number of you signing up to our pan BBC newsletters – which we’re increasingly making more relevant to your tastes and preferences.
  
  
• Over 400 editorial staff are using real-time analytics on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis to help them tailor our online experiences for BBC News and the BBC’s Homepage

What we’re up to next

Our plans are focused on you – and we’re not stopping here.  In the next couple of months, we’ll be launching a new mobile app called BBC+, helping you discover collections of content you’re interested in from across the BBC in a simple, easy to use app.  And, if like me you’re a big sports fan – we’ll be making everything from our coverage of the Euros in France to Olympics in Rio more personalised than ever.

This, along with rolling out more personalised features to our products, renewed privacy and data policy (in plain English) and a new more secure and simple ID system will ensure you continue to find the things you love from your BBC – and discover more hidden gems that you might not otherwise have found.

Phil Fearnley is Director Homepage and myBBC

• Download the full myBBC Progress Report.

I felt very welcome on the day and I really enjoyed finding out about what it's really like to work at the BBC.  As someone with a disability it was particularly good to be able to talk to other disabled staff to find out what support is available, for example Assistive Tech and Access to Work.

In addition there was a huge amount of info on offer about the tons of tech products they work on, for example what it's like to build a platform like iPlayer that gets hundreds of millions of requests per month. Or to hear from the team that design games played by millions of children or to learn how the BBC has automated the monitoring of all their online real estate. That's just a taster of the sort of information you learn at one of these events - it's all pretty impressive I'm sure you'll agree.

Having attended the event I decided to apply for the BBC's Extend scheme. Extend has changed a bit this year but at the time ‘Extendees’ were given a 6 month placement within one of the BBC departments, the idea being that at the end of the placement you'd be in a good position to apply for further work at the BBC. I'm always hesitant to apply to things like Extend - as a rule I tend to lean more toward mainstream opportunities, but I was (rightly) encouraged to think of it as a foot in the door that would enable me to prove myself.

I could write an entire blog post on the things that I've done in my placement and still not scratch the surface. As a developer in test within mobile iPlayer I've been doing all the obvious things like developing and testing but even those two things warrant blog posts of their own.

We do lots of test automation in iPlayer so some of my work has involved extending our existing tools in tandem with running manual tests and helping other teams in adopting our testing practices with a small amount of devops mixed in for good measure.

I also spend quite a bit of time giving UX/accessibility type advice to other teams. I've had a noticeable impact on lots of other products that have yet to be released which is a really great feeling; I can't quite believe how much responsibility I was given from day one - I definitely got thrown in at the deep end but fortunately I enjoy a challenge!

Something that I wasn't aware of before I joined is how much outreach the BBC does. I'm now a STEM ambassador which sees me represent my department at various careers fairs / STEM events which is always incredibly satisfying; I really enjoy giving something back and I'm thrilled that the BBC recognise the importance of these sort of activities.

At the BBC we do things that change the world and we're building things that nobody has ever built before. Every day that I go into work I know that the things I'm doing are making a real difference both externally and internally and it's for these reasons that I was delighted to accept the offer of a permanent developer in test role on the iPlayer team a couple of weeks ago.

I’m the living proof that if you’ve got the right skills then it really is possible to go from attending a Diversity in Tech event to working on some of our flagship products. If you're at all interested in working for us then I would highly recommend that you check out the details of the next event which is taking place on the 8th of April in London.

If you’re reading this thinking I’d never get a job in tech at the BBC then I totally understand, I used to think the same thing, even though I’d got a good degree in Computer Science and  some relevant work experience – but if you don’t bother applying, or attending an event, then you’ll simply never know.

And if you don’t come to the next event you’ll also miss out on hearing me present about my work on BBC iPlayer – and a pint at the end of the day. Convinced yet? You should be. I hope to meet you then.

Ben Mustill-Rose is a BBC Developer in Test

• Find out more about the next Diversity in Tech Conference on 8 April 2016

One of the longest and most eye-opening conversations we had, which we hadn’t anticipated, was how RES can support the government’s School Internet Safety agenda. As RES is built on open data and publishes open APIs which maintain provenance, it's easy to ensure that when it's integrated into a third party platform, such as a VLE, it only returns data published by the world’s leading institutions is used, allowing a level of trust by default.

So over the next few months we expect to see several companies building RES into their educational products and we’re expecting that this will begin to enhance education in schools, colleges and universities right across the UK.

It’s a core part of the BBC’s remit to 'inform, educate and entertain’. RES is playing a key part in supporting the second of the BBC’s public purposes: promoting education and learning

But last week’s success is also a call to action for the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sector.

The education sector is crying out for your content. People we met didn’t walk into the room just because they were meeting the BBC. They came because we and our partners are leading a cross-sector initiative and we’re indexing data from the UK’s leading cultural institutions - The British Museum, British Library, The National Archives, Europeana and Wellcome Trust, as well as the BBC, to name just a few.

If you are interested in getting your catalogues published as Linked Open Data as soon as possible, please get in touch via email at: RESFeedback@bbc.co.uk.

• Discover more about RES on the Research and Education Space website.
• Follow @RES_Project on Twitter

Christopher Nundy explains why, how and what challenges were involved in Strictly Come Dancing becoming the first BBC TV entertainment show to use immersive technology to create a 360 degree viewing experience.

Take a hugely successful, shiny floor Saturday night BBC show and inject just enough chaos in the spirit of innovation to deliver a new perspective for its audience with a full 360 degree view from the heart of the dance floor.

So how did we introduce the latest capture technology into the magical world of Strictly Come Dancing, in order to deliver a special, one off experience?

From the more traditional camera formats through to wearable technologies, I'm always looking for new and exciting technology we can introduce into our programme making.

When I began looking into Immersive, 360 content, there were rumblings about a substantial purchase of a kickstarter company by a certain social network site and at that point it was clear things were going to get interesting.

There seemed to be an ever growing list of content being made which just wanted to be first out of the gate; where content was filmed in the same way as traditional camera formats with nothing bespoke to best utilise the 360 degree aspect. It also didn’t deliver a repeat viewing experience.

I wanted to produce a piece of content which genuinely tested the parameters of what could be achieved currently with 360 immersive capture and also allow the BBC to test the workflows and requirements to answer the question. Can we produce 360 degree content which delivers to the same high standards of our broadcast output?

WATCH THE OPENING NUMBER FROM STRICTLY IN 360 VIEW

So why Strictly? Other than wanting to aim high and work with an award winning programme, the content lends itself readily to a 360 piece; amazing visuals made up of high energy movement and numerous points of interest throughout.

Working with the digital production studio, Rewind, we met with the Strictly production team early in the series pre-production stage. Director of Choreography, Jason Gilkison saw the potential of the format and in sharing our enthusiasm; he has put together a stunning routine for the professional dancers, giving points of interest in all areas of the dancefloor.

The routine plays to the strengths of 360 whilst always keeping the viewers in the studio and at home as the main focus. A bespoke rig of micro cameras was positioned in such a way to not cause too much of an obstruction to the audience or impede on the dancers performance.

During the pre-production process we had to overcome numerous challenges now generally taken for granted in our traditional recording and delivery format. 

• How best to position the 360 degree camera rig to capture as much of the action as possible whilst remaining at the optimum distance to allow for perfect multi camera stitching. 
• Striking a balance between capturing a credible 360 viewing experience whilst not taking anything away from the core viewers watching via the primary broadcast experience on TV.
• Delivering the content to a wide as possible audience - with the technology being so new, there are few outlets for delivering the content which is accessible to a mass market without creating bespoke applications for downloads.

While there’s a lot of work still to be undertaken in this area, this project is one of the first trials for the BBC and will form a part for the organisation in its learning and approach to immersive content production, over the coming months.

With high-resolution devices due for launch later this year, there is the potential for future use for this experimental content. The BBC will retain the master source files which would allow us to recreate and deliver to those platforms if necessary.

Nevertheless, I’m extremely proud of our achievement. We have delivered a fantastic piece of content which will appeal to a wide audience as it offers a never seen before view at the heart of the dance floor.

The project is a true example of collaboration, from the knowledge and technical skill of the teams at Rewind, BBC Technology and, of course, the Strictly production team, who understood what we wanted to achieve and worked with us to deliver a potential landmark moment for the series as it becomes the first BBC show to use this technology to this level.

“It really has helped to create one of the most memorable moments in Strictly history," said Jason Gilkison, Director of Choreography, Strictly Come Dancing.

Christopher Nundy is Innovation Manager, Comedy, Entertainment & Events.

• Experience the Strictly dance floor in 360 degrees on the Strictly Come Dancing website.
  

I have been a woman working in technology for over 20 years – frankly, that terrifies the life out of me. However, what is arguably more terrifying is that during that time, and increasingly in recent years, there has been an overall decline of the male/female balance in the field of IT.

Across the UK, females account for 45% of the overall working population. In the IT workforce this proportion is almost halved to just 23%, and has declined from 27% in 2001. In this context, BBC Digital hosting a Women in Technology Conference made for an interesting day.

Held on Friday 25th September at Broadcasting House, just stepping through the doors of this building, bulging with broadcasting history, makes you feel incredibly special – and this day was no different. From the off, being amongst all the delegates – all women! – was a revelation after attending the IT Directors Forum earlier this year where I was only 1 of 10 women out of 147 attendees.

Attendees were encouraged to tweet throughout the day using the hashtag #bbcwit, and this is something that seemed to take off straight away, following an initial introduction by Nicola Crowther who had done an outstanding job in organising everything.

The opening keynote speech from Grace Boswood, COO BBC Digital immediately inspired me. Standing in front of me was that rare thing: a woman, a family woman, who had ‘risen through the ranks’ and had a successful career in technology, heading up what seems to be one of the most rapidly changing divisions of the BBC.  Brilliant.

Next, a panel discussion hosted by Sangita Myska, addressing many of the issues facing women in the workforce today. A great mix of opinions from Grace Boswood, Kate Russell (BBC journalist), Tunde Ogungbesan (Head of Diversity & Inclusion, BBC), Vicky Brock (CEO, Clear Returns) and Julia Whitney (General Manager, BBC UX&D). Some key themes were discussed:

• gender bias is widespread and not just with the men, women are subconsciously doing it too;
• women’s assertion viewed as “aggression”;
• how women are treated in the workplace (top tip: make sure you sit in the right place at the meeting table ladies!);
• how a diverse workforce has massive benefits in terms of innovation and inspiration;
• positive discrimination is not the answer.

The inner workings of BBC iPlayer featured in the first showcase presentation of the day, presented by Rachel Evans. I don’t identify myself as a hugely technical person now, so this didn’t immediately appeal on paper. However, this presentation was for me, striking for one other reason. Rachel Evans was a living, breathing example of the BBC leading the way in diversity. Rachel Evans is a transgender woman. While that should be completely unremarkable, I still saw it as impressive. Outstanding BBC, outstanding.

Later, the BBC Digital teams all gave snapshot introductions to their individual areas of responsibility, not only continuing the fascinating insight into the inner workings of BBC Digital, but also, a real showcase of talent and people who evidently REALLY love their jobs. Overwhelmingly, everyone taking part in the day showed a genuine and touching pride at working for the BBC.

BBC Click presenter and journalist Kate Russell (pictured at top) shared her background of attending a girls school without access to technology (not dissimilar to my own) and discussed how she thought much of her drive and interest in technology was down to her brother, an interest which was at odds with her school putting sewing and home economics on the curriculum .

Kate’s experience may have been common, but it was different from mine. London schools in the early/mid 1980s, certainly in underprivileged areas of London, tended not to have access to emerging technology such as personal computers – irrespective of whether they were a girls or boys school. The girls school I attended only got its first computer for learning in 1985, when I moved into the 6th form. And I remember distinctly how we all thought we were incredibly lucky.

Kate’s presentation also included a useful overview on unconscious bias. I definitely encourage any readers visit the understanding prejudice website  - a fascinating insight into your own mind.

After personal development workshops in the afternoon , the penultimate sessions of the conference were a number of masterclasses including some insightful workshops into topics such as “Keeping the BBC ‘On Air’” and “Personal Profile & Impact” from TV and radio presenters. All attendees were very positive in their feedback and I certainly enjoyed the sessions I attended.

Dr Sue Black provided the final keynote and for me, the most inspirational talk of the day – rising from a single mother of 3 young children, to one of our generation’s leading female computer scientists, saviour of Bletchley Park and an alumni of Lewisham Southwark College (my home turf).

I really enjoyed my visit to the BBC and appreciated the Women in Technology conference. A truly inspirational day at every level – seeing role models who can inspire a new generation of technologists, getting an insight into the new world of the BBC, and getting an introduction to a digital BBC. Overall I left reassured that an IT conference doesn’t have to be male dominated. Women in Technology are a force to be reckoned with. Thank you BBC Digital. 

Lorna Jones is a Procurement Manager at Wellcome Trust